Performance Comparison of Hypervisors in the Private Cloud

Abstract

To make cloud computing model Practical and to have essential characters like rapid elasticity, resource pooling, on demand access and measured service, two prominent technologies are required. One is internet and second important one is virtualization technology. Virtualization Technology plays major role in the success of cloud computing. A virtualization layer which provides an infrastructural support to multiple virtual machines above it by virtualizing hardware resources such as CPU, Memory, Disk and NIC is called Hypervisor. It is interesting to study how different Hypervisors perform in the Private Cloud. Hypervisors do come in Paravirtualized, Full Virtualized and Hybrid flavors. It is novel idea to compare them in the private cloud environment. This paper conducts different performance tests on three hypervisors XenServer, ESXi and KVM and explains the behavior and results of each hypervisor. In the experiment, CloudStack 4.0.2 (open source cloud computing software) is used to create a private cloud, in which management server is installed on Ubuntu 12.04 – 64 bit operating system. Hypervisors XenServer 6.0, ESXi 4.1 and KVM (Ubuntu 12.04) are installed as hosts in the respective clusters and their performances have been evaluated in detail.